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Well, one of the things I’ve been doing is cooking. This is the third year we’ve held a dinner party during the eight-night festival of Hanukkah on the theme: eight friends, eight courses, each course showcasing (to one degree or another) olive oil. Last year’s menu is here. The previous year’s menu is here. And this year’s menu was:

Prelude: Potato latkes three-ways: with salmon ceviche; with brandade de morue topped with a slice of roasted red pepper; and with a slice of Shropshire blue cheese topped with cranberry-kumquat relish

Latkes: to make a couple dozen latkes, give or take depending on how big you make ‘em: shred 4 Yukon gold potatoes and 1 medium onion. Add 1 beaten egg and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well and let sit for at least 1/2 hour to let some of the starch leech out of the potatoes.

Heat a thin layer of oil in a pan to just shy of smoking. Scoop a bunch of potato mix up with tongs or a spoon and drop in the pan, and press down to make a pancake. Repeat until you’ve filled the pan with plenty of room to flip. Fry until brown on the outside, then flip and fry until brown on the other side and cooked through.

Latkes can be served immediately or left out on paper towels on an oven-safe plate or tray, and re-heated in the oven at 300 degrees or less. Refrigeration and latkes don’t really mix; they never really crisp up again after the oil has congealed.

Slice the salmon against the grain into nibble-sized bites. Juice the limes. Mix all the ingredients and refrigerate in a sealed container for at least an hour, preferably more. Adjust salt and sweetener as needed before serving.

The night prior, put the salt cod in a bowl and cover with milk. Let sit in the fridge overnight, covered. The milk will leech the salt out of the cod and rehydrate it.

Saute the onion and garlic in olive oil until both are soft but not browned. Set aside.

Roast the red pepper in the oven. Remove and place in a paper bag. When the pepper is cool enough to handle, remove the skin and slice into strips. Discard the seeds, but reserve the pepper liquid.

Remove the cod from the milk and rinse. Poach the salt cod in simmering water for 20-30 minutes, until it is fully cooked and flakes easily. Drain and place in the food processor. Add the sauteed onion and garlic, the heavy cream, the lemon juice, and the reserved red pepper liquid. Process, and while processing add the 1/3 cup of olive oil in a stream, until fully blended.

If the consistency is too thick, you can add more olive oil, or more cream, or more lemon juice, depending on taste preference.

Blanche the kumquats in boiling water to remove bitter oils. Refresh under cold water. Slice kumquats and remove the seeds.

Bring 3/4 cup water to a simmer. Add sugar and sliced kumquats. Cook until tender, about 15 minutes. Add cranberries. Cook until berries are burst and you have a thick sauce. Adjust seasonings to taste, adding more sugar to sweeten, lemon juice to make more tart.

This relish is great with roast meats, but I served it as follows: place a generous slice of Shropshire blue cheese on a latke, top with a dollop of cranberry-kumquat relish.

The green salad is really not terribly complicated. Take some baby arugula. Add some shredded radicchio; the ratio is really a matter of what color combo looks good to you. Slice thinly 1 shallot and a handful of sundried tomatoes, and toss with greens. Dress with olive oil (I used a Tuscan oil, really fruity and peppery) and balsamic (I used a white balsamic infused with oregano), salt and pepper to taste. Serve topped with shaved aged pecorino. I also dressed it up a bit with some edible violets, but that’s just presentation; they don’t taste like anything.

Cut the cauliflower into florets. Toss with olive oil and roast in a 425 degree oven until browned and soft.

While the cauliflower is roasting, chop the leeks, rinse off any grit, and saute in a mix of butter and olive oil on medium heat until soft. Add roasted cauliflower broth, salt and pepper to taste, and cook 20 minutes to blend flavors. Puree completely. If the soup is too thick, thin it with additional broth and cook on low heat another few minutes to blend flavors.

Serve garnished with a dollop of creme fraiche, a drizzle of truffle oil, and snipped chives.

(I also added a head of roast garlic to the soup, but in retrospect I’m not sure it was necessary.)

A couple of hours before, pour the olive oil for freezing into a ice-cube tray or some other freezer-safe container from which it will easily be sprung. Freeze.

While the olive oil is freezing, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Halve the butternut squash and remove seeds. Drizzle the cut side with olive oil and sprinkle with brown sugar, then place cut-side down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and roast for 45 minutes or until very well cooked. Cool.

When the squash has cooled, scoop out the flesh into a food processor. Add egg, cheeses, shallot, crushed biscotti, and spices, and blend.

Lay out a pasta sheet on a surface dusted with semolina flour. Place dollops of squash mixture at regular 3-inch intervals.

Now comes the hard part.

Remove the olive oil ice cubes from the freezer. Pop out a cube, slice it, and place a slice on top of each dollop. Repeat if you need more than one cube. Place remaining olive oil ice cubes back in the freezer.

Place another pasta sheet on top. Cut out square ravioli between the dollops with a pasta cutter or, if you’re making round ravioli (as I was), press down hard over each dollop with a 3-inch diameter glass cut cut out circular ravioli.

Repeat with additional pasta sheets until you run out of either pasta sheets or ravioli mixture. I made 24 ravioli and had a lot of mixture left over.

You can cook the ravioli right away or freeze for later. If freezing, place on wax paper dusted with semolina flour.

To cook ravioli: boil water in a shallow pan. Poach ravioli in gently simmering water until done, about 10 minutes for frozen, less for fresh.

While the ravioli is cooking, melt butter over low heat in a skillet. Add chopped sage and cook until sage is crisp and butter is brown – but do not burn the butter.

Serve ravioli covered with sage-butter sauce.

(The hard part is moving quickly enough to get the ravioli sealed before the oil begins to melt in a serious way. I’m not honestly sure it’s worth it. The idea was to have the olive oil run out and mingle with the butter sauce when you cut into the ravioli – and that happened, but it wasn’t as dramatic as I had hoped.)

Sprinkle the grapefruit with brown sugar. Broil until the top begins to caramelize. Cool.

Remove grapefruit flesh and place in a bowl. Peel Asian pears, and shave into bowl. Add olives and mint. (How much olive and mint you add is really to taste – I was somewhat sparing with the olives, as they have a very strong flavor that could overpower the salad.)

Serve in bowls, topped with a drizzle of oil and balsamic. (I would dress in the individual serving bowls because a lot of grapefruit juice sinks to the bottom, and you don’t want the dressing to be all grapefruit juice.)

For this dish I used an olive oil infused with green lemon oil, which was really ideal – if you can get your hands on it, buy it; I use it for lots of things.

While the fry oil is heating, saute the garlic in olive oil until softened but not brown. Add shiitakes and preserved lemons. Cook until the mushrooms release their water, then keep cooking until some of the water has boiled away. Add herbs and remove from heat. (I added some minced roast red pepper because I had it left over from the brandade, but that was more for color than flavor.) Set shiitake sauce aside.

Take each fish frame and bend into a decorative, “lively” shape. Skewer through the head and tail with the wooden skewer to preserve the shape. When the fry oil has reached frying temperature, deep fry the frames. (You’ll probably have to do them 1 at a time.) Remove to drain on paper towels.

Dredge the bite-sized pieces of fish in a mix of flour, salt and pepper, and deep fry. Remove to drain on paper towels.

For presentation: arrange the fish frames in the center of a platter to form a nest or basket for the fried fish filets. Mound the fried fish filets within.

Serve accompanied by the shiitake sauce and harissa or z’houg (harissa and z’houg are really, really spicy, so unless your guests love spicy food they’ll want to use the condiment sparingly).

Also trivial. Toast some pine nuts. To make parfaits, spoon layers of Greek yogurt, pine nuts and honey, and olive oil in a champagne flute. Serve.

The key, I think, is using interesting honey and olive oil. I used tulip poplar honey, which has a very strong flavor, and the green-lemon-infused olive oil, which has a deep but very bright flavor that made a nice complement to the rich and powerful honey. The hard part, honestly, is not getting yogurt all over the sides of the glass; Greek yogurt is really thick.